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America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.

Martin Amis

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Martin Amis
Age: 75
Memoirist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Abertawe
Martin Louis Amis
Doe
Short
Deluded
America
Careers
Rendering
Feel
Proud
Tender
Feels
Dead
Spirits
Way
Break
Breaks
Makes
Generally
Spirit
Writers
Overpower
Hands
Tough
Drunken

More quotes by Martin Amis

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Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
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My father always had doubts about the Booker prize, although they evaporated on the announcement that he had won it.
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No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.
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My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
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In the concordance of Nicola Six's kisses there were many subheads and subsections, many genres and phyla - chapter and verse, cross-references, multiple citations.
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I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.
Martin Amis
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The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.
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It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford.
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How incredibly avaricious the whole operation was, the way they made the Jews pay for their tickets in the railway cars to the death camps. Yeah, and the rates for a third-class ticket, one way. And half price for children.... It was a kind of exploration of evil. Just how bad can we get?
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He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
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They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.
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The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.
Martin Amis
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When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.
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Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
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It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters - which you do, without even thinking about it, just as you love your children. But also to love the reader, and that's what I mean by the pleasure principle.
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Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.
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Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.
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I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice - the first time for my first novel, the second time for my second first novel.
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When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
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My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.
Martin Amis